Academic Stasis

Those artefacts, entities and systems that percolate to ascendance in any particular organisational context tend to be as persistent, as suffocating and as self-interested as they are brittle and prone to catastrophic disassembly when encountering significant environmental perturbation. The diminishing returns on disruptive science are a function of an academic system that has undergone pathological conversion to a Taylorist assembly line of battery hens producing papers for the sake of producing more papers. The few paragons of specialist generalist knowledge and creative intellectual freedom that survive these selection mechanisms may be able to find a niche eking out a living in the leviathan bureacracies but they are probably unable to provide to these institutional systems that thing they primarily require to survive: difference.